Tsatsamis writes songs for gay clubs and the morning after (EXCLUSIVE)
Tsatsamis turns queer nights out, messy love affairs and private emotional spirals into sleek, synth-heavy pop that hits as hard on the dancefloor as it does alone at 4am
By Jude Jones
For Peter Tsatsamis-Cooper, better known as Tsatsamis, each song is like a diary entry. “Everything I write, I could go onto my calendar and point to the day it happened.” The backdrops come straight from the queer canon: the bathroom cubicles at some sweat-soaked club nights; the morning after, the scent of sex still lingering ghost-like in the air. But when it comes to details, he prefers to keep things discreet: half to maintain an air of mystery, half so as not to out the various real-life friends and lovers who populate his musical worlds. “I think I’ll keep those to myself.”
A home counties-born, London-made musician and producer, Tsatsamis is preparing to release his new mixtape, Tsychophant. His music is a sort of dancefloor confessional, which he summarises as “George Michael meets SOPHIE”. You can call it club-ready – that it definitely is; Tsatsamis has already graced stages at clubs like HOWL and festival such as Mighty Hoopla – but that undercuts its emotional breadth. “It’s music for pre-ing with your friends, music for screaming at a festival at 7pm. But it’s also music for listening to by yourself, in your feels, wanting to let the emotion go.” Bleeding, open-wound autobiography is his motor; pounding, technicoloured synths the muscle.
“I just want to dance but sometimes end up feeling quite self-conscious”
Tsatsamis grew up in small-town, St George’s cross Buckinghamshire where, as a teen, he was pushed into a double life. With no access to queer culture, he spent his hours exploring his sexuality online, timidly scrolling chatrooms and Grindr while still “way too young”, hoping to cobble together a sense of belonging. Simultaneously, he started discovering music as an ad hoc way to unlid his bottled-up feelings of isolation, longing and identity.
The school bus was an early source of sonic inspiration, where the drivers’ default station, Capital FM, introduced him to a pantheon of pop divas like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Rihanna. Later, his older, Anthony Fantano-type brother educated him on electronic trailblazers like Aphex Twin and James Blake. This, he says, opened him to the pulsing, pummelling potential of the genre, where he has since carved himself a queer little home.
Tsatsamis’ sound, which belongs as much to a Bronski Beat, Soft Cell genealogy as it does to the post-brat party zeitgeist, might leave the impression that he is a clubland native. But he describes himself as a latecomer, transformed by long nights with hometown friends at Glastonbury’s NYC Downlow stage (“I remember thinking, this is where I should be”) and off-chance Berlin DJ sets with SOPHIE (“I still don’t know how she made the sounds she did, she’s such a north star”).
Even now, Tsatsamis talks about going out apprehensively. He likes Club Smut and has had great times at Body Movements. But he is candid about the “weird emotions” such nights can excavate. “I just want to dance but sometimes end up feeling quite self-conscious.” One gets the sense, both from his eighties sound and his demeanour, that Tsatsamis is an older, more sensitive soul.
“I’ve been having stress dreams thinking about the album’s release”
“I get quite tunnel-visioned in love,” he confesses, “I’m very passionate and there’s this volatility in my head.” This volatility, speaking with him, seems well-hidden under his boyish façade: the plain white shirt and a military-shorn trim grabbed straight from a Linden Archives photo, the giggling smile, the profuse apologies he doles out when the doorbellrings half-way through our call (“I’m so sorry, do you mind if I get that?”).
But it comes alive on Tsychophant. ‘Spit or Kiss’, a vampy dance track, explores the gauzy, headfuck borderlands of queer friendship; ‘Angelina’, Tsatsamis’ most recent release, was written after a heated argument with a doomed lover and navigates the “thin line” he believesseparates pleasure and pain. The track is, in his humble opinion, “one of my best yet”.
“I’ve been having stress dreams thinking about the album’s release,” he says, “waking up at 4 or 5am.” But such is what’s at stake when you’re preparing to share such a big part of yourself with the world, a mixtape that encloses within itself a memoir. Release day, then, will probably come with some well-deserved sleep. That, and a humble pub trip with a few friends to celebrate. Tsatsamis says he’ll probably get a vodka cranberry or two to drink. “That’s my go-to order.”
The ‘TSYCOPHANT’ EP is out now.
This feature appears in Attitude’s May/June 2026 issue.